5 Tips for your Laravel translation

There are many reasons why you might want to expand your business internationally. Once your brand is firmly established in your historical market, going international can be essential for growth.

For younger companies, going international is often the opportunity to prove the replicability of the model. In short, the motivations are diverse. But if you are entering a new market, there is always one golden rule to follow: speak to consumers in their language.

Nothing is as credible and reassuring for consumers as having a brand in front of them that understands their culture, speaks their language, and knows their problems. And it is also a convincing argument when it comes to making the purchase: 75% of consumers prefer to buy a product presented in their native language. This is why translation is one of the critical steps in your international expansion!

With the right translation tool, you can localize your business and reach a particular audience in a specific region. The Laravel localization tool is one of the best web localization tools in the market. With a simple installation option and seamless interface, your team will have an easy time. This article gives you 5 tips for the best Laravel translation.

1. Identify Your Audience Accurately

Who do you want to contact? What is the typology of your prospects in this market? What are their problems, and what solutions can you bring to them? To answer these questions, you must do some groundwork: developing personas.

Thus, you determine your priority targets in the new market and therefore determine which content to have translated. There is no question of having your entire website translated, nor all your white papers and customer cases. You must prioritize! Personas help you identify which translations are necessary or urgent to offer your target only content that corresponds to them and interests them.

For example, imagine that you are an e-merchant specializing in sports accessories. You have a company blog on which you publish articles about sports news and major events. Be careful to think carefully about the interest of your readers in each market, and not to have all your articles translated without thinking! Ice hockey competitions are of great interest to Canadians, but not so many South Americans… just as pétanque is not the favorite sport in England.

2. Prepare a good translation brief

You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs!

To obtain quality and relevant translations for your target audience, start by writing a complete brief
What keywords do you want to rank for?
What tone do you want to use in your marketing content?
Should the vocabulary be sober, familiar, or sustained?
Do you want to address your interlocutors as familiar or as you?
Do you prefer rather long or short sentences?

Before having your site translated, ask yourself all these questions to share these details with the professionals in charge of translating your Marketing content.

From the SEO point of view (whether natural or paid), many companies do not know the considerable advantages of a good translation. Be aware that translating your keywords from the source language to the target language is not enough, if not ineffective.

A well-thought-out international SEO strategy requires the complete localization of your keywords and your marketing content, particularly those on your company's website.

3. Work With Native Professionals

Despite the undeniable progress of machine translation engines in recent years, translation remains a human profession. Only a human translator, and a native one, knows his language's subtleties and can transcribe your brand's essence into the target language.

Multiple online translation services give you access to large networks of native and professional translators, handpicked and rigorously tested. It is also important to choose translators comfortable in your field.

Very often, content must not only be translated but at least localized (i.e., adapted to the target and the market's culture) or even "transcreated" within the framework of an advertising slogan or a marketing pitch. A native translator knows how to optimize the translation of your Marketing content to:

Position yourself as an expert in your field of activity;
Win the trust of your target in your new market;
And ultimately convince consumers to choose your brand.

Our Laravel localization tool has features like enhanced communication for smooth teamwork during your Laravel translation.

4. Be Brief

Languages are complex, have different sentence structures, follow different rules, and use different sets of words to express an idea.

Minimize comprehension problems in the translation by formulating the source text briefly and concisely (form active clauses, no stringing together of nouns, orientate yourself), do not form long, convoluted sentences, and do not use synonyms or use the same concept.

The use of synonyms, in particular, is an often underestimated and costly source of translation errors, which multiplies with each additional language to be localized. You should, therefore, consistently use the same choice of words in the source text and never use two different names for the same term. Ideally, you introduce an appropriate word list or consistent terminology management immediately.

5. Test the Suitability Of Your Files For Translation

First, check if your files are suitable for translation. Even in the source text, the source code and structure should be designed so that possible sources of error are identified in advance. This also includes avoiding or reducing hard-coded text to a minimum since language follows different grammar rules, which sometimes produces errors with localized strings.

The easiest and quickest way to identify localization problems in advance is to test with your localization partner using a pseudo localization ("dummy translation") whether the files can be translated with the common tools and then be played out correctly so that you can import them again. Display or functional errors, for example, and over- or under-translation, can be detected and corrected in this way.

As a final note, we would like to mention an article we wrote with 10 additional tips for optimizing your Laravel localization and translation workflow. We are confident it will be helpful to you.